thought I'd make a plan of it first. You know ...sketch it out?"
Robbie nodded. "It's not a bad idea. Are these city girls, then? From Winchester or Southampton or the like?"
"No, no. They'd be from Brockenhurst. I mean they'd go to school in Brockenhurst - the college or the comprehensive? - but they could be from anywhere in the New Forest, I expect."
"Hmmm. Except they'd be from properties just like this, some of them," he noted. "So it wouldn't be that much of a diversion for them, would it?"
She frowned. "I hadn't thought of that." She walked to the kitchen window. It overlooked the driveway into the property and the west paddock beyond the driveway. She said with a sigh,
"All this land ...It seemed such a shame not to put it to good use."
"Depends on how you define „good use,'" Robbie said. As he spoke he looked round the kitchen. It was bare of those items that had belonged to Jemima: her set of cookbooks, her colourful wall hangings, and on a shelf above the table, her model horses - some of that collection which she'd kept at her family home, his own home - were gone. In their place were propped a dozen antique postcards of the sort that predated greeting cards: one for Easter, one for Valentine's Day, two for Christmas, etc. They were not Jemima's.
Seeing these, it came to Robbie that Meredith Powell was correct in her surmise. Gordon Jossie had wiped Robbie's sister completely from his life. That wasn't unreasonable. But having her car and her clothing was. Jossie wanted talking to. There was no doubt of that.
Chapter Eight
GORDON LAY IN BED THE NEXT MORNING WITH THE SWEATS come upon him, and their source had nothing to do with the summer heat, as it was early - shortly after six - and the day was not yet baking. He'd suffered through another nightmare.
He always woke with a start, a gasp for air, a weight on his chest like a test for witchery, and then the sweats. These regularly drenched him, the pyjamas he wore in winter, and the bedsheets. And when he was drenched, he began to shiver, which woke Gina up as it had once awakened Jemima.
Their reactions were completely different, though. Jemima always wanted answers to the whys. Why do you have nightmares? Why are you not talking to someone about them? Why haven't you seen a doctor about the sweats? There could be something wrong, she told him. A sleep disorder, a lung disorder, a weakness of the heart ...God only knew. But whatever the reason, he needed to take an action because this kind of thing could kill him.
Which was how Jemima always thought: people dying. It was her greatest fear and no one needed to explain to him the reason for this. His own fears were different but no less real to him than hers were to her, and that was what life was like. People had fears. They learned to cope. He'd learned to cope with his and he didn't like to talk about them.
Gina didn't require talking about them. With Gina, when he woke with the sweats in the morning after a night she'd spent with him - which was most nights, actually, and there was really no point to her keeping her place in Lyndhurst any longer, was there? - she rose from the bed and went to the bathroom for a flannel, which she dampened and then returned to use it upon his body. She brought a bowl of cool water with her, and when the flannel grew too hot from his skin, she dipped it in the water and then used it against him again. He wore nothing in summer when he went to bed, so there were no clammy pyjamas to remove. She smoothed the flannel against his limbs and his face and his chest and when he became aroused by this, she smiled and she mounted him or she did other things equally pleasurable and when she did this, every nightmare he'd had sleeping or waking was forgotten and very nearly every thought he harboured was gone from his mind.
Except one. Jemima.
Gina asked nothing of him. She merely wanted to love and be with him. Jemima, on the other hand, had asked the world. She had ultimately asked the impossible. And when he'd explained why he could not give her what she asked for, that had ended everything.